Thus, lamps – like the period’s glass production – became one of few possible materializations of modernist ideas, which had been fully repressed for some time in the field of fine arts. Lights are delicate statues with a luminous function. This holds true for both the production in the newly established producer cooperatives, such as Napako, Drupol, Lidokov, and Zukov, and the hand-crafted lights by Alena Nováková, Antonín Hepnar, and others. Their aesthetics and designing methods approximated modernist designs of European and American designers in many aspects. Although the forms are similar, the quality of workmanship often lags behind the brilliant works of French and Italian designers such as Angelo Lelli, Gino Sarfatti, Boris Lacroix, Michel Buffet, and Jacques Biny. Refined metals and detailed workmanship were substituted with imitations and substandard quality of socialist production. The unique table lamp designed by Jaroslav Anýž, a descendant of the famous pre-war lighting brand, also displayed at this exhibition, serves as an exception to these average works. This lamp, designed for the national enterprise of Lustry in Kamenický Šenov, is a technically and aesthetically artful combination of three materials: the base is made from Ditmar Urbach porcelain, the body from metal, and the shade from glass. Other lamps designed by Josef Hůrka, Pavel Grus, and others are very elegant and feature great visual aspects despite some workmanship flaws. Czech design, for that matter, struggled with the confrontation of great design and imperfect workmanship throughout the communist regime.
The organic decorative aesthetics of the so-called Brussels style, named in Czechoslovakia in relation to the world exhibition in Brussels in 1958, dominated until the late 1960s, with table lamps of various elegant delicate shapes made in the above-mentioned producer cooperatives serving as the best example.